Every day, internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google mine your online social life to advertise to you more effectively. Those companies host and control your data, and you don't. Case in point: if you've tweeted more than 3,200 times, you can't page back to your earliest tweets on Twitter.

The software I've been building for the past two years, ThinkUp, left beta yesterday. ThinkUp archives and analyzes your interactions across social networks which, more often than not, treat your data as ephemera. This is a rundown of what ThinkUp is, what it does, why it's important, and how to set it up yourself.

The conversations you have online are worth capturing, keeping, and referring back to over time. In fact, the things you share and the conversations you have about them gain weight, perspective, and importance over time, not just the moment you post them. Think about the time you announced you were getting married, or posted a photo of your newborn, or launched a project that changed your life on a social network and the conversations that ensued. That's content you want to keep.

I've spent the last six years publishing observations, inquiries, and just bits and pieces of my life on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, and now Google+, and having conversations with my friends and readers about them. That's why I built ThinkUp.

ThinkUp is a free web application that archives and analyzes your social media life. You'll need a web server to run it on, and it's geared for people and organizations who are very active on social networks and have lots of conversations they want to track, archive, and analyze. When you run ThinkUp, you'll be able to:

Store your conversations at a permalink on your site

You'll see the original post and a list a replies, as well as a list of most frequently mentioned keywords in those replies, like my question about what iPad apps I should install.

If you don't have a web server, check out our Amazon EC2 ThinkUp launcher, which will spin up a server and install ThinkUp for you on it in under 60 seconds.

ThinkUp Plugins

ThinkUp is an extensible platform that run plugins which capture and analyze data for you. Right now ThinkUp has Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ plugins which capture posts, links, friendships, lists, users, favorites, and locations from those networks. It also has short URL and Google Maps plugins. Going forward, ThinkUp can incorporate any number of plugins which talk to more networks and display data in more useful ways.

Because ThinkUp isn't yet another third-party asking for access to your data on social networks, right now its plugins require you to set up developer apps with access permissions to capture your data. We hope to make plugin setup easier in future releases.

What's Next

Speaking of future releases, now that ThinkUp is a stable platform with proven utility, it's got a promising future. Going forward, we'll be working on making the platform ever more extensible with plugins for more social networks which offer new and useful ways to slice, dice, chart, sort, filter, and liberate your data. Here's how you can help make that happen.

ThinkUp 1.0 is the culmination of 20 months worth of work from over 60 coders, designers, and documentation writers in our open source community, as well as hundreds of testers. Congratulations to the community for reaching this milestone. We hope you try out ThinkUp, and let us know how it goes.